Better Marketing Results

The Internet is full of information on how 'Content is King' coupled with keywords as a major component of your search engine optimisation efforts. Yes, a lot of the information published is valid and is correct to a point.

The important point that should never be forgotten with your content strategy and efforts is that you need to write for a human being first and foremost specifically tailoring your message or content into what is relevant, useful and interesting to your target audience.

I have written an article titled "How will Content Strategy help your business?" Have a read and tell us what you think and how you have been using content to successfully grow your business! I am equally interested in your view of what doesn't work based on your own experience.

As an owner of an online business, one of your key strategies should be keeping your clients informed: whether you're launching a new product they might like, an interesting sales campaign or simply telling them what you've been up to. This is where email marketing steps in and helps you deliver that message easy, efficient and fast.

What is email marketing?

Electronic or email marketing is sending a commercial message to a group of people (usually your client database) using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. Email marketing covers promotional advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, brand awareness and increase sales, push products and services.

Email marketing is usually sent to your segmented lists from your current customer databases. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to:

Sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.

Sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.

Adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

Allows you to measure the success of your campaigns through custom reports that reflect open rates, click through and bounce rates.

Is targeted because you can advertise the correct product, to the correct audience, at the right time for them. In return email marketing builds satisfaction and trust because your clients will receive exactly what they signed up for/what they need/when they need it.

Through a correctly targeted email campaign you can increase your return on investment and build a solid database of recurrent clients/visitors.

Email marketing and PMZ Marketing

There are some great built-in tools that will help you maximize the success of your email marketing campaigns:

You can send three types of email campaigns, in an automated manner:

An individual email campaign - one campaign sent to a custom list

An email campaign series - dynamic email campaigns based on an event or visitor interaction with your site. For example, you can choose to trigger the campaign 3 days after the visitor signed up for a newsletter.

Recurring email campaigns - you can send the same email campaign on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. And you can also put a campaign on hold when needed, easily.

Customers can choose to send the campaign to all customers, one or more
existing mailing lists, or to a new list. In the same time, you can
exclude lists or custom reports from final recipients. And the great
thing is that the system will automatically search for contacts present
in multiple lists, remove any duplicates and make sure that each
subscriber receives the email once.

Email marketing templates - you can either build your custom templates from scratch or get a head start with our set of cross-client compatible email templates for you and your clients to use. These templates cover a wide range of themes and can be accessed from within your administrative console.

Use email filtering for email campaigns - you will want to filter your lists according to categories to get the best possible results: demographics, geography, activity on the website, product purchases, subscriber validity in the mailing list etc. Using filtering the possibilities are endless, as you can always get more and more granular with your filtering criteria.

Email clients customers used to view the campaign. Example: Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, mobile phone, and so on. Keep an eye on this metric, and make sure you optimize your campaign content to look great in the most popular clients.

Number of customers that opened the email

Actions customer took. Example: A customer submitted a form on your site after viewing an email campaign.

Embed dynamic modules inside email campaigns- embed dynamic modules such as blog posts, news items or event bookings from your online web business presence, right inside email newsletters. These modules are then dynamically rendered when the campaign is sent, so the recipient sees the latest content.

We know that teenagers are moving away from Facebook and any business that is targeting this demographic needs to take immediate notice. Instagram is one of the strong winners in this trend and businesses need to consider how to promote by sharing picture images on this social network.

Here is an infographic from Bluewire Media on how to use Instagram with only 5 minutes a day.

What do you think? Can you spare 5 minutes a day from everything your busy day?

I thought I should share this with you all. It is an American based infographic from Monetate (www.monetate.com), however the information is relevant to businesses here that have both a physical 'brick & mortar' retail shop and a online web store. I find that most retail businesses that have this scenario have yet to take advantage of the all powerful mobile device and how it is now driving their purchase options and actions. Why do you think this is the case?

This is a puzzle for many a business owner with the majority of business
managers and owners looking to grow web traffic using search engine
optimisation or search engine marketing.

Yes, building web traffic volume is very important to the
success of an online business. However, we need to keep in mind that NOT all web visitor
traffic is equal. Traffic for traffic volume alone is a total waste of our time and resources. We need the right kind of quality traffic –
targeted and interested potential customers!

What in your own experience contributes to a successful online web business presence? Let's hear from you!

We have implemented Akismet (www.akismet.com) the de facto SPAM protection solution for blogs - easy to manage and use, smart (it learns quickly which comments are SPAM and which are not) and reliable (55 billion SPAM messages is impressive). We've extended
Akismet for all types of comments on your online web business presence (web pages, products, catalogues, web apps, etc).

Advantages

Easy to configure and to understand (give me a ring on 0403 436 889 or Contact Us for clarification)

Easy to manage SPAM and it can be correlated with manual SPAM moderation as well

Better for the visitors to enjoy and interact with your blog

How it impacts business owners

All site owners will have to manually enable Akismet on their websites as we haven't enabled it by default

In the beginning, Akismet may not be 100% accurate - a few SPAM comments may leak through as valid comments. Don't worry; all you need to do is train Akismet. That is, you should mark all these comments as SPAM manually. Once Akismet becomes experienced
enough (this shouldn't take more than a few days, if any), you will have a strong SPAM engine in place.

Any site owner can have enabled both Akismet and manual moderation enabled (in case there's a desire not to display specific comments from a specific user)

We’re excited to announce the details of our feature-packed September release, due to go live 25th September 2012.

Please take the time to read through the new features, enhancements and relevant documentation below, so you are prepared and able to take advantage of these new improvements for your business.

New email marketing feature highlights

A fresh set of email newsletter templates

We all know the time it takes to build beautiful email newsletters that look great. That’s why in this release, we’ve put together a brand new set of email campaign templates for you to use for your business.

There are 10 new email templates in total, spanning a range of themes, and a great starting point for your next email newsletter or promotional email. We’ve thoroughly tested this new set of templates across a full-range of desktop and web-based email clients, so you can rest assured they’ll look just as stunning, whatever the recipient is using.

You’ll also notice that we’ve refreshed the template selection screen, making it much easier to get an idea of the template you’re selecting before you apply it.

Additional email marketing enhancements

Enhanced workflows and interface for choosing recipient lists

We’ve made it far easier to search through and select your email recipient lists when creating new campaigns, simply start typing and we’ll automatically filter the through your existing lists.

The ability to “exclude” lists or custom reports from final recipients

Easily include and or exclude a certain list of recipients from your total pool of recipients. For instance, this is especially handy if you’re sending to a large list, but would like to exclude all customers who haven’t made a purchase in the 6 months.

New campaign performance report for email clients recipients are using

A brand new report for monitoring which email clients your recipients are opening newsletters with. Keep an eye on this metric, and make sure you optimize your campaign content to look great in the most popular clients.

Updated “sending” status for campaigns so you can easily monitor it’s sending progress

Keep an eye on the sending progress of your campaign as it sends to recipients.

Improved import .csv template for mailing lists

Streamlined import template, to speed up your day-to-day imports.

Unlimited, specifiable module templates

You can now specify your own HTML module templates when rendering modules, by simply adding the template’s file path as a parameter. >> Contact PMZ Marketing for details.

Embed dynamic modules inside email campaigns

We’re enabling you and to insert dynamic modules such as news items and blog posts inside email marketing campaigns, using our completely revamped Module Manager. These modules are then dynamically rendered when the campaign is sent, so the recipient sees the latest content.

There are a range of useful cases where this would come in handy – for instance, including the latest new announcement in your campaign, or embedding an up-to-date list of upcoming events customers can book in to. The goal here is to enable you to predefine templates for your clients with these dynamic modules built-in, or set up an on-going email series with the modules baked in. >> Contact PMZ Marketing for details.

Modules inside email newsletters

Using the new specifiable module templates feature detailed above, you can easily create and render these modules in a way that’s email newsletter friendly, opposed to simply inserting the web-version of the module. >> Contact PMZ Marketing for details.

Other great feature improvements

Refreshed Toolbox (previously Module Manager) for Admin v3

A completely revamped module manager (aka Toolbox) that neatly docks to the right of the WYSIWYG editor.

Many of you that have been in business a number of years will have encountered these challenges and have survived the experience to grow their businesses. For those of you that have kindly share with us your successes in managing these small business and medium enterprises marketing challenges.

Did you know that more often it is the things that you may not be doing that will have a much greater impact on your business growth than those that you do? These are areas that I have found as a business consultant as the most prevalent in holding back the growth of small companies:

Understanding your Customer Market

Adequate Planning

Managing Cash Flow

Operating a Marketing and Sales Development Process

Targeted Marketing Campaigns and Programs

What do you think? In your own business situation have you faced these issues or other more significant challenges? Share with us your views and expereinces.